Overnight Valve promoted their Proton 3.7-7 build with better alt-tab handling and full-screen behavior for many games. There is also fixed mouse behavior and DXVK 0.80 is now used for the Direct3D-11-over-Vulkan translation to yield better Steam Play gaming performance.

Steam Play 3.7-8 is also now available in beta with minor compatibility fixes, which Valve says is in preparation for future Proton versions.

Following several interesting and exciting feature pull requests for the next Linux kernel (to be released as either version 4.20 or 5.0), AMD developers have moved onto stabilizing this massive amount of new feature code.

The first "fixes" pull request was submitted today to DRM-Next focusing on stabilizing and fixing issues stemming from all this new code. As a reminder, that feature code ranges from AMD Picasso APU support along with Raven 2, a lot of Vega 20 enablement code including compute support, initial xGMI support, VCN dynamic power gating, DC display code enhancements, VCN JPEG engine support, Raven Ridge GFXOFF support, GPUVM virtual memory performance improvements, and a variety of other interesting work.

Last month's Vulkan 1.1.85 release brought NVIDIA's experimental ray-tracing extension (VK_NVX_raytracing) while for those curious how this fits into the Vulkan workflow, NVIDIA today published a guide for getting started with ray-time ray-tracing in the Vulkan space.

At the 2018 X.Org Developers Conference (XDC) in A Coruña, Spain, Daniel Stone gave an update on the status of freedesktop.org, which serves multiple projects as a hosting site for code, mailing lists, specifications, and more. As its name would imply, it started out with a focus on free desktops and cross-desktop interoperability, but it lost that focus—along with its focus in general—along the way. He recapped the journey of fd.o (as it is often known) and unveiled some idea of where it may be headed in the future.

The talk was billed with Keith Packard as co-presenter, but Packard could not make it to XDC; Stone said that he sent Packard a copy of the slides and heard no complaints, so he left Packard on the slide deck [PDF]. Stone wanted to start with the history of fd.o, because there are lots of new contributors these days—"which is great"—who may not know about it.

More in Tux Machines

Slax is a Nifty Linux Distribution That Works from USB

Slax is a portable Linux distribution that runs from USB, it aims to create a modular, modern and lightweight Linux distribution which can be carried anywhere in a USB stick. It’s also Debian-based, which allows you as a user to access tons of packages provided by Debian using the apt command.
Slax 9.6 was released last November. So we downloaded the latest release and tried it, our experience with it was great so far, see our review below for a detailed tour in Slax.

Sparky 5.6

There are new live/install iso images of SparkyLinux 5.6 “Nibiru” available to download. This it the 4th and the last this year iso image update of the rolling line, which is based on Debian testing “Buster”.

Overland, a stylish strategy game where every single step counts is due for a full release next year and it's looking good. It's been quite some time since we talked about it, as we previously highlighted way back in 2016. Since then, it's obviously had a lot of spit and polish.

Jupiter Hell is a roguelike I'm following with great excitement, it's serving a the spiritual successor to DRL (previously DoomRL, now called DRL since ZeniMax flexed their legal muscles) and it's looking good.
After a rather successful Kickstarter, where they managed to get over £70K in funding it's coming along rather nicely.

While Warhammer 40,000: Gladius is a pretty good strategy game, it did feel somewhat limited. Things are about to get hectic, prepare your defences for the Tyranids.
Tyranids will be released in the form of a DLC that will be available in January next year as a playable race. The developers say they will be "radically different" to play as due to their gameplay mechanics, although they haven't yet gone into detail on what exactly is different.

A developer from Bulwark Studios has detailed their plans to get Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus onto Linux and it sounds good.
After releasing for Windows in November, they've pushed out a few patches to improve various aspects of the game. It seems like they've done well with it, since it's sat at a "Very Positive" user rating with over one thousand users giving their thoughts.
For the Linux release, they're going to put up an opt-in beta version "before the Christmas holiday" with an aim to release in full once the holiday period is over. See their post here on Steam for more info.

Inspired by a love for games like Harvest Moon, Verdant Skies from Howling Moon Software is what they're calling a 'life simulation game'. Along with a recent update to the game on Friday, December 14th they also added a Linux version of the game.

Frosty Fest is now live in Rocket League, giving you a chance to earn Snowflakes as you play online to redeem special winter-themed items.
As always, it's completely free. The in-game currency cannot be purchased and can only be earned simply by playing the game in online matches. It's just a fun little event for players to earn some fun customisation items.

The Long Dark, the survival game pitting you against the harsh environment and wildlife has a big free update out.
As they've been talking about for a while, this update is the overhauled versions of Episodes One and Two. With a third episode due at some unspecified time.

Solve a puzzle at the Linux command line with nudoku

Welcome back to another installment in our 24-day-long Linux command-line toys advent calendar. If this is your first visit to the series, you might be asking yourself what a command-line toy even is. We’re figuring that out as we go, but generally, it could be a game, or any simple diversion that helps you have fun at the terminal.
Some of you will have seen various selections from our calendar before, but we hope there’s at least one new thing for everyone.

Latest News

SUSE: Aris Winardi, New User Interface for Open Build Service and More

Aris Winardi giving a presentation at the openSUSE Asia Summit 2016 in Jakarta, Indonesia
Aris Winardi, from Bogor, West Java, Indonesia, wants to inspire the openSUSE Community and Members to get involved in the Elections process and make it the best one yet.
The goal is to encourage all from the Community who are Contributors to the Project to apply for and get their openSUSE Membership, which will give them the right to vote in the upcoming elections and also some extra recognition of the work they do to keep the Project alive.

The content of the following article has been contributed by the Open Build Service (OBS) Team at SUSE. It is based on the two blog posts “OBS Is Revamping Its User Interface, Help Us to Make It Awesome” and “Revamped User Interface for Project, User and Group Pages“, originally published at the OBS web site and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Especially when we see large enterprises having their brand equity destroyed due to data breeches. But don`t be naïve, small companies might not get that kind of visibility but still, according to research, 60 percent of them who suffer a cyber breech are out of business in 6 months.

Review: Rolling in the Void

Void is an independently-developed, rolling-release Linux distribution with a number of interesting characteristics, such as its own package management system (called XBPS), a custom init system (runit), integration of LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL in the base operating system, and support for several popular ARM-based devices as well as x86 images. The operating system is available in several editions, including Cinnamon, Enlightenment, LXDE, LXQt, MATE and Xfce. New Void users will also be able to choose whether to run the distribution with the GNU C Library or musl libc library. I opted to download the Xfce edition running on the GNU C Library for 64-bit machines; the ISO was 693MB in size.
Booting from the Void media brought up the Xfce 4.12 desktop environment. The desktop is presented with a panel at the top of the screen which holds the application menu and system tray. At the bottom of the display is a dock where we can quick-launch applications. The desktop has a few icons for launching the Thunar file manager. If Void detects any disk partitions these will also be listed on the desktop for easy access. The theme is mostly grey and relatively plain.